PARK AND CEMETERY. 
71 
says this bulletin. “The country boy who 
does not necessarily cover more than half 
an acre in his first ten minutes of play 
should be sent to the hospital at once. 
There is something wrong with him. In 
the country, where land is cheap and where 
people are unused to being crowded, the 
school grounds should be ample. One acre 
may be regarded as the minimum for any 
school; two acres is not too much for a 
large and well-managed country school ; 
while high schools and academies, espe- 
cially those teaching agriculture, will some- 
times need five or ten acres. Country 
schools which now have less than one 
acre should buy more at the first oppor- 
tunity.” 
The school house, which, of course, 
should be well built, well furnished, well 
lighted, well ventilated, well painted and 
well kept, should be placed well forward 
cn the lot, near the street. This is be- 
cause land back of the school house is 
valuable, while that in front is compara- 
tively useless. A distance of twenty to 
thirty feet back from the road is usually 
satisfactory. Where practicable, one good 
shade tree — maple, oak or elm— should be 
placed twelve to twenty feet to the south 
of the school house, and another similar 
tree the same distance to the southwest. 
The shadows of these trees, falling on the 
building, will do more than any other one 
thing to relieve that appearance of forlorn 
nakedness and utter crudity so depressing 
in the average school house. Wherever 
conditions permit, much can be gained also 
by having a narrow border — three to six 
feet wide — of shrubbery along the house 
foundations. Usually these borders should 
be of native species collected from adjoin- 
ing fields by school pupils. 
The sanitaries should be placed at the 
back line of the lot, in which case they 
should either be separated by a fence or 
should be at the outside corners, with the 
width of the lot between them. They 
should be screened from view by plantings 
of native shrubbery. In certain cases it is 
better to group the sanitaries at the back 
of the school house, connecting them with 
the woodshed or some similar structure. 
Very special effort should be put forth to 
keep them clean and in repair. 
Fences may be dispensed with on a good 
many rural school grounds, and should 
never be built unless clearly needed. Where 
they are positively required they are usual- 
ly best made of heavy woven wire, boy- 
high, boy-strong and boy-tight, to para- 
phrase a famous saying. Every fence 
should have enough annual attention to 
keep it whole and standing straight. 
On a few country school grounds ho’rse 
sheds will be needed. These should be at 
the back of the lot, out of the way of the 
play, but open to constant public view. 
A baseball diamond is the first necessity 
for a playground. A full-size diamond, 
ninety feet between bases, requires about 
three-fourths of an acre in itself. A small 
boy’s diamond, sixty feet between bases, re- 
quires half an acre, or more than the entire 
allowance for some school grounds. Other 
sorts of play should also be provided for, 
such as swings, slides, etc., with adequate 
open ground for the usual children’s 
games. 
The planning and equipment of play- 
grounds and the organization of proper 
play is a whole subject in itself. In many 
communities this matter ought to be taken 
up urgently and quite aside from the ques- 
tion of school grounds. 
Every country school ought to be pro- 
vided with some sort of school garden. 
One-quarter of an acre will be ample for 
most schools, and a quarter of that will 
be a great deal better than nothing. This 
garden, however, should be an integral part 
of the school plan. It should lie next to 
the playgrounds, and should form an at- 
tractive feature in the general effect. 
On Arbor Day it is customary for the 
girls to speak pieces and the boys to plant 
trees. Inasmuch as the average school 
yard has room for only three or four trees, 
this exercise has to be given up or the 
yard is soon overcrowded. Plantings of 
shrubs about the foundations of the school 
house, along the property bounds and in 
front of out-buildings may well supplement 
or take the place of tree plantings. Such 
shrubs should preferably be of native spe- 
cies collected from the fields by the stu- 
dents. The best plan is to grow them a 
year in the school garden nursery before 
transplanting to permanent situations. More 
elaborate schemes of so-called ornamental 
planting on school grounds are to be 
viewed with suspicion. Flower beds in the 
front lawn rarely yield anything more than 
disappointment, and not much of that. 
The most important points to be ob- 
served in school ground design are : 
1. Convenience . — -The practical require- 
ments must be met first and absolutely. 
They are very definite and cannot be ig- 
nored. 
2. Simplicity . — -The simplest scheme of 
lay-out is almost necessarily the best. 
3. Orderliness . — -A hit-or-miss, jumbled- 
up arrangement of parts is fatal to good 
design. 
The “beautification” of school grounds, 
sometimes soberly discussed, must be 
achieved through convenience, simplicity 
and good order. A failure in these quali- 
ties can never be covered up by any quan- 
tity of “ornamental planting.” Maintenance 
is even more important than the original 
lay-out of school grounds. The grounds 
must be kept clean and in good order at all 
times. 
COURT DECISION ON PROHIBITING INTERMENTS 
(Continued.) 
That one of the petitions as presented 
urged as a reason for the abolition of the 
cemetery that “being in the vicinity of the 
new Union Depot, it is a drawback to the 
progress of the Twelfth (12th) Ward.” 
That Main street, which lies to the west 
of the cemetery, rises pretty steeply to the 
south until it reaches Thirtieth street, and 
from there going south, it descends for a 
distance of two or three blocks, with the 
result that it makes a long, stiff pull up 
hill for loads going south, and this point 
has become known and designated as the 
“Main street hump” by persons who are in 
favor of cutting Main street down at Thir- 
tieth street, and for some distance both 
north and south thereof. 
That the ordinance complained of was 
introduced in the council in response to the 
importunities of said witnesses and in 
obedience to said petitions. That during 
the pending of said ordinance in the coun- 
cil the press of Kansas City advocated its 
passage for the reasons mentioned, and 
not as a public regulation, for the benefit 
of the health and well-being of the city. 
Among the articles so published the fol- 
lowing have been selected from the Star, 
one of the leading papers of the city and 
of the United States : 
“Eager to Move That Hump. 
One Main Street Property Owner Is Ready 
to Pay Thousands.” 
And in the body of the article: 
“The subject under consideration by the 
committee was not the hump ; it was the 
ordinance to bar future burials in Union 
Cemetery. This will make possible the 
improvement of Main street as a traffic- 
way to the south side, and that is how the 
discussion drifted to the subject of the 
hump.” 
And in the article one of the spokesmen 
is reported as saying: 
“I am one who believes in doing things 
the right way. In addition to reducing the 
grade of the Main street hill, we should 
widen the street on the side of the cem- 
etery.” 
And others said that the cemetery had 
become “an impediment to the city’s growth 
and improvement.” 
In the same paper, the day after the 
ordinance was passed by the upper house 
of the Common Council, appeared an ar- 
ticle stating that among the reasons given 
for the passage of the ordinance was the 
fact “that a large part of the cemetery 
on the west side is unused and is an im- 
pediment to improvements in the vicinity 
of the new Union Station.” 
In the same article is also said of the 
signing of the ordinance by Mayor Brown : 
